Labour, identity and wellbeing in Bangladesh's dried fish value chains

Abstract

Dried fish products play an important role in the diets of fish consumers and in the livelihoods of actors in fisheries value chains throughout Africa and Asia. In Bangladesh, a large proportion of marine and freshwater fish landings are processed by drying. The scale and significance of dried fish production, trade and consumption is rarely acknowledged and poorly understood, however, in part because of a tendency for fisheries research to focus on fishers, thereby overlooking actors and processes in mid- and downstream value chain segments. Adopting social wellbeing as an analytical framework, this chapter explores the material conditions faced by labourers engaged in drying fish in Bangladesh, and the ways in which their subjective experiences and objective circumstances are meditated by and constituted through a range of social relations.